Short of ideas for Valentine’s day? Feeling slightly nauseated by a vista of red roses, outsized plush hearts and gift boxes of chocolate lips? How about a cast of a pig’s heart from Stoke-on-Trent instead? If the latter sounds more likely to enrage rather than entrance your true love please pause for thought because this particular piece of heart memorabilia has emerged from the dark and elegant imagination of The New English (TNE), in my opinion one of the most interesting companies working in England today.
Amor Vincit Omnia (Love Conquers All – see above) is indeed modelled on a pig’s heart but rendered in porcelain it retains the anatomical fascination without the gore. Designed as a vase the heart holds the water and the bundle of blood vessels on top, picked out in gold or platinum, allows flowers to be slotted in. Personally I’d go for a pair of anemones in an aorta but daffodils look very well, especially in the gold version.
As I cupped one of the hearts in the palm of my hand Paul Bishop who founded TNE along with his wife Judith, pointed out that he likes all the company’s products to pass the “house burning down test”.
He says: “You know the scenario, the house is blazing, you’ve got out the kids, the dog and your passport. What else calls you back to rescue it? I want what we make to get into people’s imaginations in that way.”
That detail about the rescued passport is telling as Bishop is in many ways an internationalist – the next TNE product launch will take place in Berlin and features a debauched cabaret rabbit – with roots in Stoke-on-Trent and a very eclectic take on what constitutes Englishness. Witnessing the decline of Stoke’s ceramics industry Bishop felt that the imagination and innovation associated with the industry’s founders like Josiah Wedgewood had been lost. Highly skilled workers were being laid off or were using their talents to produce goods that had become bland and predictable. It looked as though another distinctive English industry was about to die and become in Bishop’s words “a warehouse for baked beans employing two men and a fleet of fork-lift trucks”.
Enter TNE, a company with a vision of Englishness that stretches from thatched cottages to the Sex Pistols via the M6. Over the past two years the company has produced several ranges of china including Tectonic Plates which featured in London’s Design Festival, drew on the skills of artists from England, Europe, China and the Americas and were all made in Stoke.
One of TNE’s latest ranges is designed by Maxim, lead singer with The Prodigy and perhaps not the first person you might associate with a passion for ceramics. Having seen some of TNE’s products he called Bishop – “I wasn’t quite sure who I was speaking to at first” – and the result is Lepidoptera. A collection of butterflies/moths with skull heads painted in delicate, multi-coloured detail on plates, cups and saucers I can really only categorise Lepidoptera as Diary of an Edwardian Country Lady meets Mexican Day of the Dead. It’s a perfect illustration of TNE’s founding philosophy of ‘openness not insularity’.
Image: Amor Vincit Omnia © The New English
Amor Vincit Omnia, Lepidoptera and other ranges from The New English are available from Lifestyle Bazaar, 11A Kingsland Road, London E2 8AA
